I'm trying to build a saved search that will show a list of computers that have specific software installed. The Software Inventory workspace effectively shows this, but you have to drill into each listing to see the computers and it doesn't export the list of CIs that have that software - it only exports the list of software.

FWIW, the only solution I've found so far is to make the CI Component workspace available to some other roles, and I built a saved search in it that looks for applications only, and prompts for the manufacturer and software name. Then I modified the layout to include the Quick Actions list, and created an action to export the list to Excel.

There are ways to do what I think you're asking. If you are entering employees as the owners of CIs, you should be able to run a search for CIs where the owner is not "Internal Services", then maybe group by Owner. To get an individual employee's CI list, just filter the full CI list by an employee's name.

For my situation, I had to make the CI Component and Software Inventory workspaces available to the roles that needed to perform the search. I had to add Software Inventory because they would need to search for the software they wanted to report on first, in order to get the right info to search for in the CI Component space (software names don't always show like we think they should).

Unfortunately our software is manually loaded so it doesnt appear at all in the software inventory at all. The CI is not referencing the owner by rather a relationship because 15 people may have Visio for example and thats what I'm trying to get in both directions. I essentially wanted to set up a dashboard item/s with a quick to export to excel.

Are you using the Discovery agent? It will show all software installed on any CI with an agent (workstations, servers...). It sounds like you're looking more for a software license inventory/management tool, as are we. I believe that is possible with other HEAT products, like LANrev, but that's a whole other ball of wax.